Flapper (23 page)

By the following year, Coco was fully out of debt to Boy Capel and employed three hundred women at her various factories and stores. By the early 1920s, that figure grew to upward of three thousand workers. She was well poised to dominate feminine fashion for the coming decade.

Coco proved a demanding, sometimes autocratic boss. Moderately talented as a seamstress and completely unschooled in standard draftsmanship, she was nevertheless a master artist and perfectionist. She worked with live mannequins rather than paper patterns and often required as many as thirty fittings—each lasting hours on end—to complete just one muslin design. Then it was left to her small army of workers to replicate her model with total precision.

Marie-Louise Deray was twenty-one years old when Coco tapped her to be chief seamstress for her fashion house.
¹⁹
“We worked with jersey, a fabric that no one had used before to make dresses,” she remembered. “The ‘diagonals’ went every which way and we had to start over again several times. Mademoiselle was very demanding. If a fitting went wrong she exploded. She loved to pester people. I cried a lot, believe me. She was tough, unrelenting with the staff. But what she came up with was sensational, both chic and exceedingly simple, so different from Poiret.…”

Coco paid her mannequins the paltry sum of 100 francs per month, scarcely enough to live on and certainly a mere fraction of what it cost wealthy clients to purchase just one Chanel dress. When associates urged her to pay a living wage, Coco just shrugged. “They’re beautiful girls. Let them take lovers.”
²⁰

Arriving at work each day in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, she conducted most of her business from a lavishly decorated private apartment above her couture house and adamantly refused to make appearances even for the wealthiest of customers. It was a calculated
trick that the narcissistic Paul Poiret could never have pulled off, but it worked for Coco. Her inaccessibility lent an aura of mystique to the whole Chanel operation. The dresses kept selling.

Chanel’s signature style culminated sometime around 1923 in what commentators called the “garçonne look”—a nod to the 1921 best-selling novel
La Garçonne
, about a young woman who rebels against prevailing feminine roles to strike out on her own and earn an independent living. The book was so scandalous that its author was stripped of his
Légion d’honneur.

The garçonne look—called simply the “flapper look” in England and America—dominated women’s fashion for the better part of the decade. It featured tubular dresses with dropped or invisible waistlines, high hemlines that crawled up toward the knees, tank tops, straight vertical lines, and intricate decorative beading, topped off with bell-shaped cloche hats. Though its color schemes changed from year to year, and though it gradually incorporated new fabrics like tweed and new design elements like geometric patterns, the flapper style remained fairly constant throughout the decade—so much so that Bruce Bliven, editor of
The New Republic
, felt confident in speaking of a quintessential “flapper uniform”—“the style, Summer of 1925, Eastern Seaboard.”
²¹

Lois Long, who expanded her coverage for
The New Yorker
to include fashion as well as nightlife in 1925, summed up Chanel’s lasting imprint on women’s wear in 1926 by observing that “when sports clothes first came into vogue for every type of day wear, a few years ago, the general opinion was that England, land of the hearty sportswoman, would provide fashions in this line, and that Paris would continue content with her supremacy over afternoon and evening frocks. Such was not the case.”

On the contrary, designers like Chanel “got busy, immediately feminized tweeds and flannels.”
²²
The New Woman, Long observed, now enjoyed a selection of comfortable, durable, yet elegant clothing that carried the added bonus of being “suitable for participation in all, save the very strenuous, sports, such as mountain climbing, lion hunting, and the exploration of the arctic.”

Those who knew Coco before she became world famous would
easily have recognized the masculine influences in her clothing line.
²³
Her jerseys, sweaters, and dresses incorporated subtle elements of sailors’ uniforms, stonemasons’ handkerchiefs, reefer jackets, and mechanics’ dungarees. Paul Poiret scoffed at her designs and called them
misérabilisme de luxe—
poverty of luxury.
²⁴
A somewhat more impartial observer noted that “women no longer exist; all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.”

The androgyny in Chanel’s design—and its physical redefinition of feminine sexuality—suggested that men’s and women’s roles were bleeding into each other. A Parisian law student underscored this point well when he asked, “Can one define
la jeune fille moderne
?
²⁵
No, no more than the waist on the dress she wears. These beings—without breasts, without hips, without ‘underwear,’ who smoke, work, argue, and fight exactly like boys, and who, during the night at the Bois de Boulogne, with their heads swimming under several cocktails, seek out savory and acrobatic pleasures on the plush seats of 5 horsepower Citroëns—these aren’t young girls! There aren’t any more young girls! No more women either!”

Androgyny didn’t go hand in hand with asexuality. Quite the contrary. Flapper fashion regularly incorporated “Oriental” or “primitive” themes drawn from sub-Saharan and Asian civilizations, like skullcaps adorned with Egyptian textiles; hat designs by the French milliner Agnès that were “suggested by an African Head-Dress”; wooden-and-gold bangles, “slave collars,” and “slave bracelets”; and an “exotic toque from Alex,” “trimmed with cross in tête de nègre.”
²⁶
In the context of the 1920s, to borrow “Oriental” themes was to suffuse one’s designs with raw sexual power.

This borrowing from other cultures reflected the greater contact that Americans and Europeans enjoyed with non-Western peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, courtesy of imperialism and global trade. When white Europeans wrote, talked about, and analyzed these people—tasks to which they devoted considerable time and effort—they often contrasted their own state of overcivilization with the alleged raw, primitive instinct of the “Orient.” In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud concluded in 1915 that “white nations” enforced a “renunciation of
instinctual satisfactions,” whereas nonwhite societies encouraged the realization of human urges.

Popular and pseudoscientific tracts on the raw sexuality of “primitive” peoples—volumes like Ernest Crawley’s
Studies of Savages and Sex
(1929) and Bronislaw Malinowski’s
The Sexual Life of Savages
(1929)—drove home precisely this point. The white American journalist Ray Stannard Baker best summed up prevailing ideas about exoticism when he explained, “If civilization means anything, it means self-restraint; casting away self-restraint the white man becomes as savage as the negro.”

In weaving so-called primitive or Oriental themes into their wares, leading couture houses were assigning the modern woman a new, unspoken sexual power popularly associated with darker, non-Western peoples. It was an idea that worked in concert with other features of flapper design.

The most familiar ingredient of flapper fashion was the creeping hemline, which culminated sometime in 1925 or 1926 with skirts that fell fourteen inches above the ground. “ ‘The hemline moveth slowly up and nowhere doth abide,’ ” reported the
Washington Post
’s fashion critic in 1925.
²⁷
Two years later,
The New York Times
marveled at the new spring lineup from Paris.
DISPLAY OF SPRING FASHIONS SHOWS THEM BARELY LONG ENOUGH TO COVER KNEES
, readers learned.
²⁸

The trend scandalized defenders of the old order, who were particularly alarmed by the sight of bare legs—a result of the preference for sheer stockings that quickly became a feature of the garçonne look.
²⁹
A Baptist pastor offered the following object lesson to his congregates:

Mary had a little skirt,
The latest style no doubt,
But every time she got inside,
She was more than halfway out.

Others took it all in stride. Even the conservative
Ladies’ Home Journal
remarked that “as American women are noted for their pretty
feet and ankles, it is pleasant to learn that skirts are going to be short … though one must adjust length to becomingness.”
³⁰

Coco wasn’t the only designer in Paris to raise her hemlines or to make an imprint on flapper fashion. Whereas Chanel’s sleek, boyish models enforced the appearance of a trim and linear figure—often achieved with the help of a breast flattener that deaccentuated all traces of feminine lines—Madeleine Vionnet, one of her chief rivals in women’s couture, pioneered bias-cut designs that emphasized women’s natural curves. By cutting material against the grain—an exceedingly difficult process involving great patience and skill—she was able to create an altogether new effect in dresses and skirts. The bias cut clung to the body and assumed the shape of its subject rather than the other way around.

Though Vionnet adopted many of the conventions of Chanel’s flapper look, a discerning eye could tell one woman’s imprint from the other. And in the twenties, many women were developing that eye for fashion. Still, by sheer force or personality, it was Coco who dominated the world of couture in the twenties.

In one of her first fashion columns for
The New Yorker
, Lois Long mocked other journalists for their “yearly cry” that “bobbed hair is going out; that big hats are to be
de rigueur;
that skirts are to be longer; and that waistlines are to be reestablished.
³¹
This time, they pin one of their stories on the fact that Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt insists upon long skirts. They forget that Mrs. Vanderbilt has always worn them.” Ultimately, Long claimed, “what Mrs. Vanderbilt wears and what manufacturers want has no more effect on fashion than Dancing Teachers’ conventions on night clubs.”

Short skirts, dropped waistlines, and straight silhouettes were here to stay. For that, the world could largely thank Coco Chanel.

Standing outside the Rainbow Fashion Show in Chicago, 1926, two flappers enjoy the democratizing effects of the ready-to-wear revolution.

16
I
NTO
THE
S
TREETS

I
T WAS ONE
thing for Coco Chanel and a select group of Parisian couturiers to revolutionize the clothing of those fortunate few women in France and America who could afford to drop hundreds of dollars on an evening gown. But what of the millions more who couldn’t? After all, rich people throughout the ages had slavishly embraced new fads and styles without influencing the purchasing habits of their economic and social inferiors. Why should the 1920s have been any different?

“The whole position of women in Western civilization,” wrote Madge Garland, a prominent 1920s fashion critic, “her struggle for equality and her success, is reflected in the garments she has worn.”
¹
In earlier years, this struggle for autonomy and self-definition was limited to those privileged women who could afford to carve out their identities by following the currents of style. Now, with the advent of ready-to-wear clothing, the development of cheaper fabrics and synthetics, and more take-home pay in the pocket of the average working woman, “fashions [became] democratic.”

By the time Coco made her name in the world of high couture, it took startlingly little time for the latest designs unveiled at rue Cambon to filter their way down to midrange department stores in Muncie, Indiana. More striking still, it took only a short while longer for Chanel’s signature to work its way into the vast American countryside, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs
that brought city fashions right to the doorsteps of American farm families.

In effect, the flapper look that Chanel helped pioneer wasn’t just for the rich Parisian. It belonged to every woman who wished to claim it as her own. This was a radical concept.

Until the early twentieth century, most American women made their own clothing. The mass-made, ready-to-wear garments that we take for granted today simply didn’t exist.

This had been the case for a long time. In 1791, when Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton prepared a report on American manufacturers, some “two-thirds, three-fourths, and even four-fifths of all the clothing of the inhabitants” of the United States were “made by themselves.”
²
Twenty years later, the government commissioned yet another study that found more than two-thirds of all American clothes were homemade. The rest were hand crafted by dressmakers and tailors who designed and sewed their wares for wealthy patrons who could afford to enlist their services.